English-learning infants developing sensitivity to vowel phonotactic cues to word segmentation

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Infants learning language must segment continuous speech into words.
• Early word segmentation relies on domain-general cues like transitional probability (TP).
• Language-specific cues, such as stress and phonotactics, also guide segmentation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how English-learning infants integrate transitional probability (TP) and language-specific vowel phonotactic (VP) cues for word segmentation.
• To determine the developmental shift in cue reliance between 5- and 10-month-old infants when these cues conflict.

Main Methods:

• Infants were exposed to artificial languages with either consistent or conflicting TP and VP cues.
• Behavioral experiments measured infants' sensitivity to word segmentation based on these cues.
• Age groups tested included 5-month-olds and 10-month-olds.

Main Results:

• When TP and VP cues conflicted, 5-month-olds relied on TP, demonstrating reliance on domain-general information.
• In contrast, 10-month-olds prioritized VP cues, indicating a shift towards language-specific patterns.
• These findings mirror previous results where older infants prioritized stress cues over TP.

Conclusions:

• Infant word segmentation develops from general statistical learning to incorporating language-specific constraints.
• Findings support statistical bootstrapping models, where infants use distributional information to segment words and then learn language-specific rules.
• This developmental trajectory highlights the interplay between domain-general and language-specific mechanisms in early language acquisition.